Would you like some tea? A cookie? Have you read your fortune today?
The Rio-born artist Panmela Castro presents at MAR a playful, relational, and intimate experience inside a white cube infused with references to retrofuturism and cyberpunk. Here, the audience is invited to wander through and experience her transdisciplinary, enigmatic, and polysemic work, materialized in paintings, videos, photographs, sculptures, participatory installations, games, and performances.
Over two decades of her career, Panmela has become known for an artistic and activist practice that refuses to separate art from life, developing propositions rooted in care and attentive listening. Her aesthetic objects are the result of performative actions that materialize pressing concerns such as the (im)possibility of affective bonds, social empowerment, the transgression of stereotypes, solitude, gender-based violence, platonic love, and self-love. These and other themes, approached with candor, irony, and a touch of humor, permeate the artist’s production, which is also pedagogical and radical, embracing poetic and caring gestures that function as micropolitical acts.
The exhibition unfolds within a multiple temporal dynamic and opens in an incomplete form, with part of the works being created and displayed throughout the season. Panmela shares with the public her most genuine emotions, whether in instagrammable situations or moments of intimacy in the studio. In various propositions, she shares the protagonism of her narrative with others—be they close companions, people with striking life stories, or strangers who activate a piece and thus become part of it.
A program of ritual performances complements the exhibition space. Panmela Castro evokes a syncretic ritualistic mode that blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction, acting in the world through sensitive and powerful artistic processes. The many personae of the artist always have something to tell us—and to listen to. Now, come in and make yourself at home: the exhibition is an invitation to reinvent yourself. After all, what is love without reinvention?
- Daniela Labra (Curator)
